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James Demo’s The Peacemaker, screened at the 2017 Galway Film Fleadh, is a documentary portraying the life of Padraig O’Malley, who worked in some of the most significant conflicts throughout his life – from Northern Ireland to South Africa, to Iraq. His peacemaking process model is interestingly based on his own recovery from alcohol addiction. The…

Francesco Totti, the beloved captain of Italian soccer team Roma, admitted he was afraid upon retiring from professional football during his recent farewell speech before his last game. This candid admission humanized the sport and shed a light on the vulnerability of the aging sports star that sees his career come to an end with…

In 1921, Buster Keaton was dishing out hit after hit. As Carl Sandburg observed at the time: “While Charlie Chaplin is taking it slow and easy and making sure that he is not going to have a public overfed with Chaplin stunts, the managers of Buster Keaton are taking him through many ropes. … No…

Goodbye Youth (Addio Giovinezza!) is one of Italy’s most famous, beloved, and important operettas. It was so popular that Italian soldiers sang its songs in the trenches during the First World War. The Great War would also claim the life of one of its writers, Nino Oxilia, who died at the front during the battle…

Jacques Tourneur’s Circle of Danger (1951) is structured around the investigation of a mystery with its roots in the Second World War. In the film, an American, Clay Douglas (Ray Milland), is obsessed with discovering the truth behind the death of his kid brother, Hank, who fell at war during a commando raid. Douglas believes…

Before Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), there was Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob the Gambler (1956). Melville, by his own admission, based its story on John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Indeed, the film’s noirish influences and variations on the classic American genre film format are evident right from the start. Yet, there are many other elements that…

Playground is a necessarily uncomfortable film that bleakly exposes the darkness of a child’s soul. Inspired by true events surrounding the killing of three-year-old James Bulger at the hands of two ten-year-olds in 1993 Liverpool, director Bartosz M. Kowalski employs a style that recalls both Elephant by Gus Van Sant and Michel Haneke. It essentially…